


The Definition of Home

by Corvid_Knight



Category: Homestuck
Genre: KARKAT FUCKING DIES, M/M, Sadstuck, Very Heavy Angst, my datemate - Freeform, my tumblr is knight-of-heart-and-art, oh yeah, we weren't even dating yet when i wrote this WHY, why did I write this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2017-12-06
Packaged: 2019-02-11 13:24:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12936201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corvid_Knight/pseuds/Corvid_Knight
Summary: Dave and Karkat had a life on Earth C. A family.One fucker with a firebomb changed that.Now Dave's the only one left. And he can't handle that.





	The Definition of Home

_Thirty seconds._

_That's all it would have taken._

_Thirty seconds sooner, and you'd have been inside with them. Thirty seconds, half a fucking minute, and maybe you couldn't have done anything to stop this but you wouldn't be here, alive, alone, watching the house you and Karkat designed together blaze and collapse and feeling blood drip off your fingers. Yeah, you guess you avenged Karkat and the kids, killed the guy that just tossed some kind of bomb through the window, but that changes nothing. Nothing._

_They're gone._

_They're fucking_ gone. 

_A hand comes down on your shoulder, and you spin around, sword snapping up to defend or attack, but it's just Jade. You still almost drive the blade through her chest before you can stop yourself._

_Her mouth is moving, but you can't hear anything over the ringing in your ears._

_You lipread your name. You see her trying to ask you some question. You see that she's crying—you aren't crying, not yet, there's blood on your face but no tears—and you can't do this._

_You're done. You can't do this. Not without him._

_The Time powers are always waiting somewhere in your head, even if you haven't used them for so fucking long. You grab them, don't even think where or when, and before Jade can get a tight enough grip to keep you with her you're somewhere else. Somewhere dark, empty, silent, and full of stars._

_You don't think you're ever going to be able to go back home._

 

You haven't seen Dave for twelve years.

It still fucks you up to think about him. He's not dead, Jade promised you that she saw him, tried to talk to him right after shit went down, but he's been somewhere else this whole time. (Or probably some _when_ else, knowing your bro.) Wherever or whenever he is, he won't let himself be found. 

(God knows you tried. All the splinters of yourself you know of, you sent out to search for him. Everyone's tried, Roxy spending weeks trying to use her Void powers to call him out of nothing, Jade hunting him through as much of the universe as she can reach, Jake doing his best to warp reality and probability to bring him home. None of it worked.)

He's gone. He's not dead, you still haven't stopped hoping he comes home, but you've admitted to yourself that you might never see him again. 

Except you come out of your room one day, and there's a familiar red-clad figure curled up on the floor by the couch. 

Your first thought is that you're fucking hallucinating. 

Your second thought is that he's going to use his Time powers and be gone as soon as he realizes he's not alone. You really, really wish Jake was here to block that possibility, but no way are you leaving to go find him. Instead, you mentally cross your fingers and move across the room as quietly as you can, kneeling down next to him. 

"...Dave?" 

For a second, he doesn't move at all, and the thought that he found some way to kill himself despite being godtier crosses your mind. You don't even know what you're going to do if that's true. 

Then he shifts, pushing himself up off the floor and looking up at you. He looks horrible—his shades are gone, you can see the new grief-lines, the shadows under his crimson eyes so deep that they might as well be a permanent part of his face. You wonder if he's slept at all in the twelve years since you've seen him. 

"Yo." His voice is even worse than his face—rough, unused, not quite soft enough that you can't tell how broken he is. He clears his throat before saying anything else, but it disant get much better. "I...hey. Hey, Dirk." 

"Hey." There is absolutely nothing you can say that would be the right thing. You still have a few hundred things you want to say to him, ask him. What comes out of your mouth isn't the best question, but it isn't the worst one either. "Did you go see Jade yet?" 

Dave flinches at that, hands balling up into fists in his lap as he looks away from you. (Is he going to hit you? You'd let him, if he tried.) "No. Not gonna." And, even quieter, "Shouldn't've come back." 

He's going to leave again. 

You grab his wrist, as tight as you can without worrying about hurting him, and he looks back up at you in confusion. "Don't you fucking _dare_ think that, Dave," you tell him, shoving your own shades up out of the way with your free hand before taking his other hand. "We've all been looking for you, we all wanted you to come home. What happened wasn't your fault." 

Dave shudders, hard, closing his eyes for a second before he manages to get control over himself. He doesn't try to get loose from you, though. "F-fuck whose fault it was. He's...they—they're still..." 

For maybe a full minute there's no sound in the room but Dave's uneven breathing as he tries to keep from sobbing. Eventually, he just gives up, pulling his hands out of your grip to cover his face. You expect him to fight you when you wrap your arms around him, but he doesn't resist at all, just leaning into your touch. 

You want to ask him if he's okay, but you don't think he's capable of reaching that state anymore. Instead, you hold onto him and wait for his shaking and soft, pained sounds to stop. 

"Let me go," he says, finally, almost too quietly to hear.

"Not until you see Jade." He needs to know what happened with her. You'd tell him, but you don't have the right to do that. 

"I _can't._ " 

"You need to. She's got some shit you need to know, you've already made her wait twelve years—" 

"God, I thought it would've been longer...I can't fucking measure the time shit anymore, Dirk." He sighs, shaking his head and finally taking his hands away from his face, hesitantly wrapping his arms around you. "It's. It's been—you don't even know how long for me..." 

"Shh. It's okay." Dave's words break up into another sob when you reach up to brush his hair back from his face. "Where did you go?" Please let him think about something that isn't what he lost, even for just a minute. 

"...end of the universe, I think." He sniffles, curling against you and pulling his cape in like it's a security blanket. You can't help but notice that it's ripped, worn-out in a couple places—you didn't even know that that could happen to godtier outfits. "Some place...some time...with fewer stars to wait between. I didn't want to see anything...wanted to remember, at first...after a couple decades I just wanted to forget..." He shudders, again, one hand clutching at your shirt as he closes his eyes. "Couldn't forget. Don't really want to, I guess...want it to not fu-fucking hurt..." 

"I'm sorry," you tell him, as gently as you can. He's crying again. When you move to adjust him so you can stand up, lift him off the floor, he weighs less than he ever did. 

"Wanted to come home," he whispers, and now he's more or less limp as you carry him into the other room and sit down on the bed with him. "I'm so fucking tired, bro."

"I know, Dave. You're home now." He won't let you go, so you lie down and pull him closer. "Go to sleep." 

"Don't leave me...I'm so fucking sorry, don't leave me..." 

"I'm not going anywhere. I promise." 

 

timaeusTestified (TT) started pestering gardenGnostic (GG) .

TT: Jade.   
TT: _Jade._   
TT: Jade, check your goddamn phone.   
TT: Jade, I realize that I've said you could assume messages from me aren't usually urgent but this is the fucking exception. 

GG: why? whats going on? 

TT: Dave's back. 

GG: what??  
GG: oh my god, dirk! is he okay?

TT: Physically? I think so.   
TT: Mentally and emotionally, he's...really fucked up. From what I can tell, he was gone for maybe a couple hundred years. Spent all of it as isolated as he could get.   
TT: Which is "completely." 

GG: and he just came back to you???  
GG: i mean no offense but i would've thought he'd come here first...

TT: He doesn't know about her, so I guess he just decided to go to his blood family. Or he wasn't thinking at all.   
TT: Like I said, he's fucked up right now..

GG: he doesn't KNOW?!  
GG: you didn't tell him?!.  
GG: dirk strider. you tell him, right now.

TT: Jade, he's asleep. And I'm not waking him up, he needs the rest.   
TT: I'm going to try to talk him into coming to talk to you when he wakes up. 

GG: you are going to tell him as soon as he wakes up, you mean?

TT: No.   
TT: I'm worried he'd just. Panic. Leave.  
TT: He's already ran away from everything once.   
TT: I don't want to lose him again, Jade. 

GG: well i don't either but he deserves to know.  
GG: he _needs_ to know. 

TT: I know he does. But I can't tell him.   
TT: Like I said, I'm going to try to talk him into coming to see you. If I can't do that, I'll message you and you can both come here and talk to him. 

GG: you should just tell him...

TT: Yeah, well.   
TT: I'm sorry.   
TT: I need to stop texting you before I accidentally wake him up. 

GG: ...fine  
GG: tell him i missed him, okay? 

TT: You can tell him when you see him. 

timaeusTestified (TT) is offline. 

 

It takes a week to talk Dave into going to see Jade. When he realizes that she doesn't live where she used to, right next to where his house used to be, it gets a little easier to get him to do it. You try to convince him to start out by calling her, texting her, anything that'd ease him into it, but every time you press too hard you can see him getting overwhelmed, see him start to think about leaving, and you have to let it go. 

Eventually, though? He gives up and agrees to see her, mostly because you will not shut the fuck up about it. You text Jade yourself, tell her you're coming, and drag Dave out the door before he can change his mind. The trip over is evenly divided between reassuring Dave that yes, this is going to be okay, she doesn't blame him for what happened, and clandestinely texting Jade on what to definitely not say to him. 

Jade probably doesn't need the prompts, but she's kind enough to recognize that you're dealing with stress by micromanaging, and just lets you do it. 

Dave stalls at the door, stopping dead and looking over at you. He still hasn't replaced his shades, and you've neither asked him what happened to them or offered to find him another pair. But that means you can see the fear in his eyes. "Dirk, I can't do this—" 

"Come on." You reach past him, hit the doorbell, and wrap one arm around his shoulders, just in case he decides to use his Time powers. You're not letting him leave without you. "You _can_ do this, just calm down. It'll be okay." 

"...yeah." He takes a deep breath, but does literally the opposite of what you hoped he would, forcing the panic off his face and going tense instead of relaxing. Damn the Strider tendency towards stoicism. He tries to shrug your arm off as Jade opens the door, but no fucking way are you letting him do that. "...uh. Hey, Jade." 

Fuck, she's already almost crying. 

"Eleven years and all I get is 'hey?'" The words are scolding, but her tone's definitely not, and you let go of Dave when she glances at you so she can pull him through the door and wrap him up in a hug. "We missed you so much, Dave, we were all so worried about you..." 

Dave has not relaxed even the slightest bit, but after a second he does, carefully, put his arms around her. "I...sorry. 'M sorry," he mumbles as you step inside as well and shut the door. "I missed you too. I'm sorry. You shouldn't have—shouldn't've worried, I'm..." 

You can't quite hear what Jade whispers to him, but it sounds a bit like "shut _up_ " and the fact that Dave goes quiet bears that out. She holds him until a little bit of the tension goes out of him, than steps back, wiping her eyes. "I have something to show you," she tells him, shooting you a less-than-angry glare. "I tried to get Dirk to tell you, but he wouldn't do it and you weren't talking to me." 

"Sorry." You and Dave say it at precisely the same time, and Jade just shakes her head. 

"Come on." Jade grabs Dave's hand, leading him through into the kitchen, and you follow a few steps behind. 

The girl coloring at the table is familiar to you—you've seen her almost every day of her life, after all, taken turns raising her with everyone else. You never realized just how much she really does look like Dave, though—the similarities to Karkat are easier to notice, the same short horns, the smile that's hard to coax out but so, so beautiful, how her short Strider-white hair tousles up into utterly unmanageable spikes. Now that you have Dave in the same room, though, you can see him in her face, especially when she looks up, smiles at you, and blinks at Dave in confusion for a second. 

When you look over at him, his face is completely blank, mouth half-opening and closing a few times before a choked, unintelligible noise comes out. 

Your niece—Dave and Karkat's second kid, the only one that survived the fire twelve years ago—tilts her head a little, studying him for a minute or two. Then a look of pure joyful surprise lights up her face, and she slides out of the chair and takes a step towards him. "Daddy?" 

Dave nods, but he doesn't move. Maybe can't move. You and Jade both push him towards her at the same time, and he staggers a bit before taking another step forward and wordlessly holding out his arms. As soon as he does she shrieks, launching herself forward onto him hard enough to knock him back a step, wrapping herself around him as he scoops her up off her feet. 

Jade's really crying now. Dave's holding onto his daughter like she'll disappear if he lets go, sobbing out unintelligible words. You're about to cry yourself, but you pull one of the chairs away from the table, gently guiding Dave to sit down before he can just collapse on the floor. 

He lets go of her with one hand when you do that, wrapping his arm around your neck and pulling you down enough to press his lips against your cheek for a second. "Thank you, fu-fucking—oh my _god_ , I'm so s-sorry, I—" 

"Shh, Dave. It's okay." You give both your brother and your niece a quick, tight hug, then step back to stand with Jade again. "You glad to be home?" 

He looks up at you, looks down at her, and just nods. Even though he doesn't say anything else, the amount of raw joyful gratitude on his face is all the answer you need.

**Author's Note:**

> @ my moirail: are you happy now?? _are you happy now?_


End file.
